1
“Y'all been down to the Big Easy before?”
The old man behind the wheel of the dented minivan was attempting small talk in order to lighten the mood, which hung like a pall over the vehicle's interior as the van rattled over the dark, bombed-out interstate. A brown-skinned Cuban gentleman of indeterminate age, he kept throwing sidelong glances at the man sitting in the shotgun seat.
From the moment he had arrived in New Orleans, the dapper, handsome African-American man on the passenger side hadn't said much. Dressed in his sharp Burberry topcoat and charcoal silk scarf, he was as stony as a department store mannequin, clearly still in shock over the professor's death, clearly being buffeted by the sudden and unexpected loss. You could see that much in his eyes. In fact, the man's eyes were dead giveaways. The almond-shaped, cappuccino-colored eyes were set off by almost feminine lashes and arched brows. The eyes of a movie starâat least superficially. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the man's eyes revealed deeper anxieties, rougher times about which the driver could only speculate.
“Once,” Ulysses Grove replied, gazing wistfully through the rain-jeweled window. They had just left the airport (much of which was still under repair), and the terrain looked like a desolate, uncharted planet in the outer reaches of some uninhabitable solar system. Illuminated only by sporadic sodium light, the scars left behind by the floodwaters were still apparent everywhere. Before Katrina, or BK as the natives referred to places and things that had survived the disasterâsadly, much of what occured in New Orleans these days was given the suffix AK or After Katrinaâthe district along Highway 10 once looked like a vast, innocuous industrial park. Now the waterlogged warehouses and abandoned factories were mostly dark, and the interstitial roadways and vegetation had mostly been eaten away with rot, suffocated by flood damageâsome of it still underwater. “Years ago I came down here,” Grove added softly, “when I was in the service.”
The army, to be exact. He had been an investigator in the CID Unit in the eighties, and had come here for a few days to ferret information from the family of a deserter. The case had been a routine job for Grove, but he had gotten to know the city fairly well on that trip, and found it fascinating in spite of his aversion to its more voluptuous pleasures. New Orleans had always been a big flirtatious harlot of a town, and still was, bless her heart, despite her recent miseries and endless months of cosmetic surgery. But during that routine trip back in 1987, the place had touched some deeply repressed part of Grove's psyche.
Of course, repression was di rigueur for Grove. It was how he did his job. It was how he lived with the terrible images that stained his mind's eye. It was also how he dealt with his grief and sorrow. It was how he was dealing with De Lourde's death, and it was how he had carried on after his wife, Hannah, had succumbed to cancer a little over five years ago. Maybe that was why Grove felt so adrift in melancholia now. The post-Katrina New Orleans mirrored his wounded soul.
“A military man!” the driver exclaimed, raising his bushy graying eyebrows with histrionic relish. Miguel Lafountant, a music instructor at Tulane, was an old friend and colleague of De Lourde's. In the glow of the dashboard lights, clad in his leopard-print sport coat, he looked more like a pimp than a professor. He had a thick, soft physique and ancient, wrinkled brown handsâhands that gestured dramatically as he spoke in his odd Creole accent. “Sweet Lawd, Delilah,” he commented with a lascivious chuckle, glancing in the rearview mirror at the figure riding in the backseat. “I'll just betcha he still looks stunnin' in that old uniform. . . whattya think?”
“Oh Lordy, I'd give my eyetooth to see that!” laughed the figure in the rear. Obscured in shadow, she had a big, husky, smoke-cured laugh.
It was difficult for Grove to make out the woman's features in the dark van, but every few moments a flash of sodium vapor light would illuminate her statuesque form. A big-boned black amazon, Delilah Debuke wore a sequined top, a feather boa, and a big bouffant of crow-black hair. It took more than a few furtive glances at the rear seat for Grove to realize that she was not a
she
but a
he
.
Grove smiled to himself. Over the years, as an overworked criminal profiler for the FBI, he had become so accustomed to the far boundaries of human behavior that he found most of the harmless, eccentric varietiesâdrag queens, cross-dressers, transsexualsâalmost quaint in their requisite delicacies. In fact, he always took a gay man's flirtation as a compliment. Besides, Grove was immersed in the professor's world now: a place where ruined marble tombs vie for space with strip clubs, and the spirits ooze from the cracks in the moldy cobblestones like absinthe, and the stains of Katrina's floodwaters tattoo the sides of buildings like the ghosts of some ancient holocaust burned into the sediment. It all had begun to wrench at Grove's heart.
“So y'all worked together on cases?”
The smoky voice from the backseat pierced Grove's thoughts, and he said, “Yes, as a matter of fact ... last year, right before Katrina. The professor helped me on a tough one.”
“Did y' all catch the guy?”
“Actually, we did.”
“That's good.”
It seemed odd, when Grove thought about itâand he
did
think of it oftenâhow Katrina had come only days after the resolution of the Sun City case. It was as though the heavens had opened up and purged some kind of malevolent force that had been festering up there in the upper atmosphere. And the subsequent, tragic aftermath, claiming the lives of so many innocent and poor, would prove to be America's deepest wound, her greatest natural disaster. But for Grove, the Sun City case had been a
personal
disaster, a turning point in his life and career, and even in his belief system.
It had started simply enoughâa series of motiveless murders across the Midwest, all the victims posed postmortem, taken down by a sharp trauma wound to the neck. But the case had taken a bizarre and unexpected turn when a vacationing Grove had happened to visit a remote laboratory in Alaska to view an archaeological discovery. The six-thousand-year-old mummy had been found in a glacier by some hikers in 1993 ... but the weird part, the absolutely
inexplicable
part, was that the mummy, a victim of foul play itself, bore the exact same poseâthe same modus operandi, the same signature, the same
everything
âas the victims of the current at-large killer Grove had been hunting.
From that point on, there was nothing ordinary about the Sun City case.
Grove remembered the first time Professor De Lourde had come on board the case. It was in a hotel banquet room in San Francisco a year and a half agoâduring the Sun City Killer's final spree. De Lourde had been one of a handful of anthropologists who had provided expert background on the connection between the current killings and the cycles of similar homicides down through the ages. In many ways the professor's analysis had helped Grove catch Richard Ackerman.
Ackerman had been an accountant in “civilian” life, a secretly deranged man who might or might not have been possessed by an alternate personality as ancient as the mummy itself. But ultimately, in the course of apprehending Ackerman on the side of a jagged precipice in the Alaskan wilderness, Grove might very well have absorbed the entity
himself
.
To this day, the profiler was not certain about what had happened in that remote mountain cabin in the woods after Ackerman had been killed. All that malignant energy had seemingly transferred itself into Grove. But all Grove knew for sure was that De Lourde had been there during the so-called cleansing ceremony that had saved Grove's life. Professor De Lourde had helped save Grove's soul, if not his sanity.
“He helped me in ways I'll probably never know,” Grove mused finally, staring at the rain-streaked windshield. “He was an amazing character.”
“He was always quite proud he had survived Katrina's floods,” the drag queen commented.
Grove asked whether Miguel and Delilah had evacuated or stayed in town.
The drag queen waved her painted nails. “I got the hell out of Dodge, thank you very much. I didn't need no mayor telling me to skedaddle.”
“I fled the scene as well,” the driver said, not without a trace of shame in his heavily accented voice. “I still remember Camille in '69. I was just an adjunct at Tulane at the time ... it was just awful. And
this
one made Camille look like a gentle summer rain.”
Delilah's voice broke a little. “Of course, when we came back there was nothing. Nothing left. My place on Napoleon Avenue was reduced to a couple of chimneys stickin' outta the water. Roof collapsed like a toy. They found my landlady in the rafters, nothin' much left of her.”
Grove said he was sorry.
“But old Moses, he stayed put,” Delilah went on. “Right in the Quarter. Like Joan of Arc. He was such a drama queen. Said he didn't care, he would ride the gallery into the gulf if it came down to that.”
“What happened?” Grove asked.
A shrug from the drag queen. “Lucky for Moses, the Quarter's always been smack dab on a sandbar, highest point in town, and most of them old Spanish galleries survived Katrina.”
Miguel Lafountant let out a sad chuckle. “I remember comin' back a couple of months later, when they got the bridge back up and running. Found Moses right where I left him, down at Jack Riley's bar on Bourbon Street, sittin' there just as pretty as you please. Still decked out in his seersucker and silk, sipping a finger of sour mash. I understand Riley's stayed open the whole damn time, even during the floods.”
Grove sighed. “I just can't believe he's gone. Still doesn't seem real.”
They drove in silence for a while.
As they neared the Central Business District, the lights of old New Orleans began to spangle the horizon. After months of heartache, lawlessness, disease, rebuilding, drying out, more lawlessness, more disease, and more rebuilding, the old Crescent City still clung to its fetid concavity between Lake Ponchartrain and the Mississippi like a stubborn barnacle. Some of the old sections of town were still flooded or still in transition, the cranes rising up and vanishing in the dark heavens, the ruined tops of crumbling gothic cathedrals truncated like old, twisted, deforested trees. A putrid odor pervaded everything: the air, the ground, the sodden buildings still musty from the cleanup. It was the mingled stench of rot and moldâa mixture of stagnant, polluted waterways and the methane and swamp gas from all the decayâmost of it thinly masked by the sickly sweet scent of commerce, a smell of grease, malt, and burning sugar.
They turned south down Canal Street, a vast expanse of trolley tracks and traffic lanes strewn with branches and papers and sundry storm detritus. It was hard to tell which of the litter was from recent storms, and which was from Katrina. Now they headed east into the French Quarter, their tires growling on centuries-old wet cobbles. The streets narrowed, and the buildings closed in, their gaslit promenades flickering and sputtering behind veils of mist. Grove rolled down his window and breathed the air, which was so musty-smelling it brought to mind the inside of an old clothes hamper. The sidewalks were strewn with trash stirred up from the storm.
Grove finally broke the silence. “Really appreciate you picking me up. Especially during such aâ”
Grove stopped abruptly when he noticed the old Cuban was softly crying. Tears glistened on his lined, leathery cheeks. His shoulders trembled.
“âsad time,” Grove said, completing the thought. It was all he could think of saying. It was the night before the professor's funeral, and the pall that seemed to hang over this city only added to Grove's sense of loss, sense of hopelessness.
The drag queen in back was fighting his own tears. “Damn fishy time, y'all ask me!” he blurted.
Now
that's
an interesting thing to say at a time like this,
Grove thought, and all at once he noticed something about Delilah Debuke that he hadn't seen initially. It was apparent in the flashes of passing light, the way her watery gaze kept shifting from the window, to Grove, to the floor. Grove knew that look well. Over the years, he had seen it on the faces of witnesses, the faces of suspects, the faces of victims' families. It was the look of someone who had something to set straight.
“I'm sorry, did you say âfishy'?” Grove turned to face the back now.
“I'm making a play on words, in case you hadn't noticed,” the drag queen murmured, the passing lights of a car gleaming like two pinpoints of flame in the centers of his painted eyes. “I mean, sure, poor ol' Moses met a
fishy
end out there on the point, but at the same time the whole thing stinks of rotten fish, if y'all know what I mean.”
Grove cocked his head at her. “I'm not following. The news reports said he died from flying debris. From the storm. Did they get it wrong?”
“What was he doin' in Algiers?” Delilah said with a little rhetorical flick of his brow.